And now a journalist was coming to interview her with “some information” about her old friend, Raghu.
The journalist, one Rafael Silva, had come and gone. Upon arriving, Mr. Silva had handed her a carved wooden box, one that she immediately recognized as a gift she had given Raghu before his trip to Brazil. It was meant to hold odds and ends and, in fact, it contained a couple of broken Shells, a small wooden peg, an abstract wooden carving, several sensor cells and optical wires, and a sheet of paper filled with Raghu’s handwriting. Wrapped in a leaf, secured with twine, was a five-centimetre long lock of grey hair with a few black strands.
Mr. Silva had been covering a gathering of Amazonian tribal leaders near the city of Manaus, he said. The recent droughts in the Amazon and changing water and weather patterns had caused the tribes to come together to share knowledge. He had struck up a conversation with an elder of the local Dessana tribe. Upon learning that Mr. Silva was a well-travelled journalist, the elder had produced the box. It had been handed to him by a member of a remote tribe in the Amazon’s interior over a year ago, who told them of a stranger and foreigner living with them for several years. The stranger had died from a gunshot wound inflicted during a raid by a gold mining company about two years before that. Thirteen people from the tribe had also been killed. Dying, the stranger’s last wish had been that the box be delivered to a city so that somebody could send it to his people in a far country.
The name scrawled on the box was Mahua’s, and the address was her old one in Ashapur. The box had taken two years to travel from the interior of the rain forest to the city. Mr. Silva had been so intrigued that he had added India to his itinerary of a trip to southeast Asia. He wanted to deliver the box in person.
“I am so grateful,” Mahua said when Mr. Silva had finished. She wiped her tears. “Thank you for coming all this way.”
“My pleasure,” Rafael Silva said. After that, she was glad to answer his questions about her life and work, and her association with Raghu. The household gave him a meal, and a place to stay the night, and then he left the next morning.
All of the next day, Mahua read and reread the writing on the sheet of paper, held the broken Shell, the lock of his hair in its package of leaf and twine. She thought of the leaf falling from some great Amazonian tree, of the hands that would have picked it up. She caressed the leaf, which was dark green and waxy.
Dear Mahu,
I have forgotten how to communicate in this language, so forgive me.
I came to the Amazon with our technology because I wanted to know the language of the leaves and the animals. I wanted to talk to the forest itself. But after a few years, I realized that the sensors only answer the questions you already know to ask. How do you know what other questions are there? I have lived in the forest with my guides and companions, and through them I have learned that there is a language before language that the Earth speaks.
The Amazon once had great settlements along the river, civilizations that never forgot their relationship to the whole, and so they existed for millennia without collapsing—until the Europeans came. No trace was left of them after their destruction except for a few shards of pottery because everything they made was from the forest, and the ruins were absorbed into it. How did they know how to live like this, without modern technology? To learn the answer, I had to learn what the forest had to tell me, merely as human, as an earthling. I came intending to save it, but it saved me instead. Now, I repay my debt by giving myself back to the Amazon. But I was raised by the air and water and soil of my first home, and so some part of me should return there. Will you take this lock of hair, burn or bury it in a forest somewhere near you? Forgive me for not being there for you these many years.
I hope Naniji lived a long life. There has never been a day I have not thought of you. I am at peace now.
It would have taken him enormous effort to write this missive. From the shapes of the letters, she knew that his fingers had trembled. There was a faint rust-coloured stain in one corner of the page. In the evening she told the family, “Call Ikram for me. I want to go out tomorrow.”
The sense of waiting for something that had come upon her some time ago was turning into a feeling of impending arrival.
Ikram’s boat edges away from the river toward the sea. He is a lanky youth with a serious mien, Mohsin’s grandson. She sits in the middle of the boat under the canopy, Raghu’s box on her knees. The day is suffused with a silver light, the sun is behind the clouds. There will be no rain today, but perhaps the monsoon will build up again tomorrow. The steep, wind-battered slopes of the Mumbai Archipelago are covered with the faintest purple blush. The karvi flowers are starting to bloom, obeying their eight-year cycle.
Mahua feels as though Raghu is with her, in this boat. She is showing him the drowned city, the towers like slender pencils over a smudge of old, squat, shorter buildings. It is hot and humid. Look, the sea-lanes are busy with the boats of the fisherfolk and water taxis bringing people and goods from the southern coast. Ahead and to their right, a skyscraper is slowly tilting into the water. Wagers have been made on when the whole structure will succumb to the sea, but the sea keeps its secrets.
The hills of the five islands of Mumbai rise to her left. As they turn into a channel, hugging the shore, she sees the shrine of Baba Khizr on the rooftop of an old building, only a metre above the water’s surface. It is surrounded by boatloads of people seeking his blessings. From here she can see all the way up the slope to where Billionaires’ Row had once been. The trees, vines, and wild animals have taken over the concrete rubble, and at the very top, there stands a shrine to Samudra Devi, goddess of the ocean.
This is the age of the small gods, she tells Raghu. Local deities, long-forgotten pirs. Even Ram is the Ram of the vanvaas.
Domiciles covered with vines of vegetables and flowers cluster on the hills of the islands. At the water’s edge, boats and rafts rock against their moorings. As the boat glides through the watery thoroughfares, they are greeted with waves and shouts, delayed every few metres by conversation, because she hasn’t been out here in a long time, and everyone knows her and Ikram.
The Baba Khizr shrine, she tells Raghu, holding the carved box in her lap, marks where Mohsin once saw a vision. An old man walking on water, standing on a fish that bore him through the channels of the city toward the open sea. Mohsin had heard stories of Baba Khizr from his father, a refugee from the mouth of the Indus River in Pakistan. There are similar stories as far-flung as Bihar and Arabia, about a pir who was the guardian of the waters, whose feet, when they touched the ground, made flowers bloom.
The boat is moored, and Ikram has helped her off it. They are climbing steadily, although every few minutes she needs to stop for breath. Every breath she breathes, she owes to this ancient planet and its great biogeophysical cycles, the scales of which transcend the mere couple of hundred thousand years of human existence, and all the boundaries of nation and continent. She thinks about dust from the Sahara bringing nutrients to the Amazon rain forest to the west, affecting the Indian monsoons to the east. Her breath comes hard, an intimate entanglement with this vast, unfolding drama. “I’m feeling grateful today,” she tells Ikram, who smiles. At long last they are at the forest’s edge. The air is cooler here, and a breeze stirs the leaves. She hears, distantly, the trickle of water, and the bell-like call of a koel from deep within the trees. A muddy path runs into the forest.